THE FALL by Albert Camus THE AUTHOR Albert Camus (1913-1960) was born in Algeria, which was then a French colonial possession. His father was killed in battle in World War I a year after Albert’s birth, leaving his family in poverty. Camus worked his way through the university of Algiers by doing odd jobs, but dropped out after a severe bout of tuberculosis. He then turned to journalism, writing for an anti- colonial newspaper in Algeria, and briefly turned to communism, with which he quickly became disillusioned, before moving to France. During World War II, he served as part of the French Resistance against the Nazi occupation forces, editing the underground newspaper Combat. It was during his years in the Resistance that he developed his philosophy of the absurdity of life, which he expressed clearly in his first novel, The Stranger (1942). Soon after he published The Myth of Sisyphus, expounding further on the ideas presented in the novel. Later novels, including The Plague (1948) and The Fall (1957), also met with widespread success, leading to his being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. Throughout his career, Camus was also fascinated with the theater, writing several plays and translating and adapting numerous works by others for the French stage. He was killed when he wrecked his sports car in 1960. The Fall is a novel about a man who, like Camus himself, struggled to deal with sin in a world without God, guilt in a world with no grace. The author grasps, far better than many Christians and almost all humanists, the reality of self-centeredness in the best works done by the most noble of men. Sadly, he finds no solution aside from acknowledging universal guilt, thus enabling one to live with one’s own depravity. This study guide is based on the 1956 Vintage paperback translated by Justin O’Brien; the book contains no chapter numbers, but I have numbered the divisions in the novel for ease of reference. 1 PLOT SUMMARY Chapter 1 The story takes place in a bar in Amsterdam called Mexico City. The narrator, a former Parisian lawyer named Jean-Baptiste Clamence, is engaged in a conversation with a stranger in the bar, though we do not hear the other half of the discourse. He begins by remarking on the bestial nature of the bartender, who seems by nature to trust no one. The narrator is cynical about mainstream society, arguing that it, like a school of piranhas, nibbles away at a man bite by bite until there is nothing left of him. Clamence, tells his new companion that he used to be a lawyer, but now he is a judge-penitent. He questions his friend, deducing that he is middle-aged, relatively prosperous and well-educated, and somewhat open-minded. He asks him if he has ever shared his wealth with the poor, and when the man responds in the negative, he tells him that he is a Sadducee. Clamence, too, is a Sadducee, for he was rich and gave nothing to the poor, yet now he is poor himself, having nothing. He lives in what used to be the Jewish quarter until Hitler depopulated it. He tells the tale of a woman forced by a German officer to choose which of her sons would be shot, and a pacifist who welcomed all into his home and was disemboweled by the militia. He then remarks on the Hollanders, insisting that they are men wandering around in a dream, their minds far away from their bodies. He compares the canals of Amsterdam to the circles of Hell and decides that the Mexico City is at the center of the deepest circle, where all the refuse of Europe congregate. The two agree to meet the next day, and Clamence suggests his friend visit one of the prostitutes whose houses they pass on the way home. Chapter 2 When they meet the next day, Clamence tells his new friend something about himself. First of all, Clamence is not his real name; he was once a famous lawyer in Paris who specialized in noble causes such as defending widows and orphans, whom he never charged for his services. He avoided corruption of all kinds and even refused the Legion of Honor when it was offered to him. He would even run to help a blind person across a street, being sure to arrive before any potential competition. He was unfailingly helpful to strangers, bought trifles from peddlers, and gave alms to the poor. He was courteous in the extreme, giving up his seat on the bus and letting others take a taxi ahead of him. He always preferred the heights to the depths - hilltops to caves, balconies to basements. In general, he was enamored of his own admirable nature. He realized that the criminals he defended, like him, often sought to enhance their own reputations, but the fame of the criminal is usually short- lived, while the renown of the benefactor remains for all to see and appreciate. He was popular and in demand in all the best circles. He realized, however, that his success was not due to his own merits, but to being for some reason chosen by Fate for superlative happiness. Yet with all this, he was not satisfied, but always longer for more pleasure. Each festivity left him convinced for the moment that he had found the secret of ultimate happiness, but the feeling would always leave him the next morning. He found friendship to be empty, so much so that one only truly loved someone after he died, when one felt no obligation toward him. Along those lines, he remembers how he and others responded to the death of a particularly unpleasant concierge. The man’s wife spent lavishly on his funeral, then proceeded to have an affair with a singer who beat her mercilessly; after he left, she continued to praise her monstrosity of a dead husband. Then one warm evening, everything 2 changed. He was standing on a bridge and heard laughter. At that point he interrupts his story and promises to continue it the next day; he needs to defend a local art thief. Chapter 3 In the days that followed, he did not hear the laugh again, but he stopped taking nocturnal walks across the Seine. At the same time he began to experience depression. At this point he interrupts the story and asks his companion if they can leave the bar and take a walk. They pass a house that used to belong to a slave trader, and Clamence remarks that everyone needs slaves of some sort, even if only a wife, children, or a dog. He then returns to speaking of himself, describing himself as a consummate play actor whose entire focus was on himself while he pretended to be a benefactor to all. These things he gradually discovered about himself after the evening when he heard the laugh. One particular incident stood out in his mind: he was driving when a motorcycle cut him off at a red light, then promptly stalled. He asked the man to move his bike, but he profanely refused. When Clamence got out of his car, a bystander told him to leave the man alone, then punched him in the face, at which point the cycle started and people began honking at Clamence to move his car. Later, he considered that he should have hit the bystander back, chased the motorcycle, and thrashed the rude driver; his failure to do so played on his mind for weeks. He could no longer picture himself as the bold opponent of evil, and his desire to beat the malefactor led him to question his supposed altruism. He then goes on to explain that he was always successful in getting what he wanted from women. He saw them as “objects of pleasure and conquest,” while his only true love object was himself. Women both satisfied his carnal lusts and his passion for gambling. He derived more pleasure from brief sexual encounters than from intellectual discussions of the highest order. He shares with his companion some of the strategies he used to get women into his bed, and confessed that these couplings, while they satisfied his desires, even more fed his love of power over others. One of his one-night stands, however, was especially troubling. A girl who seemed to him very passive and submissive later told one of her friends about his deficiencies as a lover. He couldn’t stand such humiliation and worked to get her back, then proceeded to treat her shabbily and finally left her. From that day forward he began to laugh at himself - his grand speeches in court and the lines he used with women - because he recognized then that he was a hypocrite. What, then, was the incident that changed his life? Two or three years before hearing the laughter on the bridge, he was crossing the same bridge and saw a woman looking into the water. After he passed her, he heard a splash and a cry, but did nothing. For several days after that, he refused to read the newspaper and thus knew nothing of the woman’s fate. Chapter 4 The next morning the two men meet at the Mexico City to take a trip to the island of Marken. As they look out on the sea, the sand, and the dikes, everything is gray and barren, “everlasting nothingness made visible.” He admits that he has no friends; he knows this because if he committed suicide, no one would really care, and besides, he would be unable to see their reaction.